


The Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

by dorkilysoulless (custodian)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-02
Updated: 2014-04-02
Packaged: 2018-01-17 22:13:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1404382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/custodian/pseuds/dorkilysoulless
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel reflects on his increasingly aberrant nature as an angel who has fallen, gained free will, experienced life as a human being, and tasted the possibilities of sex.  Existential crisis under the waxing moon, and he can probably blame Dean WInchester for it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

Castiel can remember a time – a very, very long time, long enough that human beings would use geological terms to describe it – during which the concept of existential crises had been alien to him both in theory and practice. 

He misses the simplicity.

He is standing in a clearing about 100 yards past the tree line in a strip of woods behind a rest stop, staring at the waxing gibbous moon. Night ebbs and flows around him: insects singing and nesting and reproducing, animals awake and asleep and largely involved in the same endeavor, plants rustling and growing and respiring. He is uncertain that he would be able to explain just why he stopped if pressed. There is no practical reason. He’d simply seen the “Rest Area” sign and thought yes, he would like to rest, and yes, this area is adequate.

In quiet moments over the last few years, he’s tried to understand why it was he’d had to fall. Sometimes, Castiel has faith that his condition is a part of God’s larger design, and that the fall was necessary and preordained and not evidence of some terrible flaw. Other times, he looks at his actions and the consequences and sees only evidence that he is a cursed thing. 

Even his attempt at penance in Purgatory had resulted in pain and death. 

While his senses fall far, far short of omniscience, he’s more fully able to appreciate what he’s capable of after living without his grace for a time. No human being can imagine what it means to know the night in this particular way, to know the soil beneath his feet is as alive with creatures as the forest is, or to see the light of the stars and the barely-shadowed moon with angelic eyes. Astounding how a thing he’d once dismissed as “just the planet casting a shadow” can be so beautiful, yet also so lonely because it is a thing he cannot share. 

The beauty is alloyed by Theo’s stolen grace buzzing inside of him like etheric tinnitus. Like a phantom limb in reverse, it threatens to burn and sting, to jerk him away from the night like a hand from a hot stove. 

Castiel scowls and turns his attention to the hum and howl of the highway instead. He closes his eyes and counts the cars. Not one of them is an Impala. He hadn’t hoped for one exactly, but there is a kind of mystical sympathy between the highway and Dean, a connection of ideas. The highway might exist without Dean Winchester, but no Dean that Castiel can imagine could exist without the highway.

Is he the same way? If he is, what is his highway?

Castiel wants to say God. He is an Angel of the Lord, and so the Lord should be the right answer to give, but he knows it is not. Castiel can no longer imagine himself as a being who acts and does not question. He might be created by God, and the void of Him has driven the Host mad, but He is not the reason Castiel is now a moral agent in his own right.

Castiel’s highway is Dean Winchester. 

It is as if Dean has fed him from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the only thing the Knowledge of Good and Evil has given Castiel is the awareness that Good and Evil are impossibly complex in ways he’d never imagined in Heaven, and look surprisingly alike up close.

He misses Meg. She was a very good example of Good and Evil being confusing. He regrets that he never got to show her the other things he learned from the Pizza Man. Or the things he learned from April, even though Meg was already gone by then. 

He is sad about April, but not in the same way. April feels like collateral damage, and he feels guilty about her vessel, chosen deliberately to lure and harm him, but there is not a hole in him where she should be as there is with Meg. 

Meg had kissed him on purpose, and watched over him while Sam’s madness burned away inside him.

Castiel wonders if sex is like peanut butter sandwiches, and if his return to angelic power will change the way it feels. He hopes not. He understands, after April, why Dean indulges. But Meg is gone, and April wanted him dead, and he is not interested in asking Dean to solicit him another prostitute. And, as an angel in possession of grace, he no longer feels the drives built into his vessel’s body. He is free again to be indifferent.

He is supposed to be indifferent.

“Castiel?”

The angel in the clearing, Ephra, keeps a respectful distance, averting his eyes and clasping his hands behind his back. Like any angel, he has enormous power and potential, but his fall was not a choice. He is still a creature of hierarchy and subordination, and now that Balthazar is gone, Castiel is his new master.

_I am ill-prepared to be your Host’s highway, Lord._

“I’m sorry,” Ephra continues, unsure. “You disappeared. The others were worried. Should I tell them to wait?”

“Please.” 

Ephra nods, and Castiel watches as he turns and makes his way back toward the rest area parking lot.

_I have killed so many of our brothers and sisters, Lord. Why does Ephra follow me? Why do any of them follow me?_

Castiel listens once more for an Impala, then follows Ephra through the forest.

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to solidify where I see Castiel as a character around mid-S9, and some of the challenges he ought to be having making sense of his experiences in the context of being an angel. I also wanted there to be some consequences for his having stolen Theo's grace. 
> 
> I should probably mention that I'm not ruling out Destiel at all with this piece -- I ship it like burning, and it's here if you squint, probably, and this is my headcanon enough that if I write S9 or later Destiel this may be where Cas is coming from -- but I wanted to focus on the consequences of canonical relationships before I started digging myself any deeper.


End file.
